Topic: Dooglus "AMA" - page 3. (Read 2895 times)

OK, so let's give the casino a better chance.  Each player starts with just $25, and has to flat-bet $25 over and over until they either bust or make 1000 bets.

Now the casino is bound to win, right?

Wrong:

i guess my risk preferences are more risk averse than yours.  i'd gladly risk the 100x for the 10x more chance of winning.  90% just seems a much better shot than 9%.

but personally i'd be limited to only acting on the 0.1BTC bet because i don't have the bankroll for 10BTC bets.

OK, maybe I misunderstood your specification, but here are the results:

I coded a simulation, ran it 6 times.  The first time I ran it the first player busted and the 2nd player made 1000 bets without busting.  The other 5 times the first player made 1000 bets without busting:


Here's the simulation code:

I'll run that simulation and let you know how it goes.

I do understand OP and it's worth a shot.  You're thinking that even though people might be "winning" with an edge of like 1% or something, they'll keep playing until they lose.  It is risly but if you could make it owrk that'd be great.  You would have to stop bots because they wouldn't have "emotion" so that was a great point too.

If you want to win 1 BTC, you could:

a) risk 0.1 BTC at 9% for an 11x payout, or you could
b) risk 10 BTC at 90% for a 1.1x payout.

In each case you expect to lose 1% of the amount you risk, so b) costs about 100 times more than a) in terms of the amount you expect to lose, while only having a 10 times better chance of success.

That makes 90% seem like a bad deal compared to 9%, even though they both have a 1% edge.

Does that make sense?

its probably just the risk of gambling so much to win so little.  I dont think Doog means that only 90% is a bad idea.  maybe he has a range of 85-95% thats bad in his mind..  or perhaps 90% up to 98.99% is a bad range..  dunno.  i think its subjective.

What does generally a pretty bad idea mean ? As far as I can understand , the house edge should be equal at all levels and that would just be a lot less fun (as you have no chance of winning something substantial) , with the same amount of risk.

Is my understanding wrong ?

i remember halving the kelly lead to quartering the risk.  something to do with a squared of the denominator thing...

Maybe consider the risk of losing half the bankroll - a kind of a 'half life' thing.

Also, what if someone came with enough coins to bet the maximum at 98% over and over.  Each time they have a very good chance of winning 0.5% of the house bankroll.

If they win 138 times in a row, they've won half the bankroll, and they can do so with 6% chance:

>>> 0.995 ** 138 = 0.5007
>>> 0.98 ** 138 = 0.06154

If the max profit per roll was a full 1% of the bankroll, they only need to win 69 times in a row, and they can do so with 25% chance:

>>> 0.99 ** 69 = 0.4998
>>> 0.98 ** 69 = 0.24808

So by cutting the max profit from 1% to 0.5% we've made it ~4 times harder to win half the bankroll by max-betting at 98%.

makes lots of sense.  i guess the best way to calculate risk of ruin is to go through a bernoulli process then.  Assuming a reasonal bankruptcy point > 0.  maybe 30-40% of original bankroll.  since going to 0 would be infinite time.

It seems kind of obvious that in a 0% edge game whoever has the biggest bankroll has the smaller chance of going bust...  Not to say that everything is intuitive with probability stuff, but in this case I think it makes sense.


Pretty sure they're assuming the max bet is a constant.  Casinos generally don't reduce the max bet as players win...

When the bankroll is crowd-sourced and changes dramatically over time like it does at JD it makes sense to set the maximums dynamically so they change with the bankroll.  That has a side-effect of vastly reducing the risk of ruin.

I'm thinking about this paper which doesnt corroborate with what i said earlier..  http://www.library.unlv.edu/center-gaming-research/2008/09/article-impact-finite-bankroll-even-money-game.html.

but still i think the math stands up that if the player has a larger bankroll than the house, player has a larger chance to bankrupt the house than the house has to bankrupt the player on a 0% game

and this is where i calculated the ruin %..  if you input the odds of the house win as 0.505 and loss at 0.495, at 100x bankroll compared to max bet, the chance of ruin is 14%...  which is really high.  i wonder how they came up with that formula.
http://www.urbino.net/digital-books.cfm?dID=13&p=3&sID=87  bottom of the page.

http://apheat.net/2013/05/11/phil-ivey-won-7-8-million-pounds-by-edge-sorting-baccarat/ From what i heard, the rules of the game were agreed upon before hand which included that his requests to the dealer to flip certain cards would be upheld.  The casino must have thought it was a superstitious ritual and not know that it could allow him to perceive small defects in the cards.  


yes agree!  but this game has an element of skill which affects EV.


also agree!  counting on online gambling sites is just too easy as well.  You could set up a bot to give you the exact count and EV and perfect bet amount based on kelly.  i'm not surprised they quickly changed their game after that and banned your IP.  you're too smart for them!


definitely have seen +EV signup bonuses, sometimes used as loss leaders or just management ignorant of the math behind the scenes.  I always feel great when i can find a good deal.  even if its just for a hundred or so dollars.  haha!

and I don't believe 0% roulette could ever be +EV for the house, at least not from the winnings directly from that game.  I'd hesitate to offer that the variance of the game would wreak more havoc than the winnings would provide comfort.  But overall, as long as its doing its job as loss leader, and bringing players to play other games, it might be worth it.  Just keep the limits lower on that 0% table.  I remember reading some scientific paper that if the bankroll of the player is bigger than the house, the player will bankrupt the house playing 0% odds.  i'll try to search for that paper.

Dammit. I'll write a script next week, because now I have absolutely no idea if I'm being stupid or not. I've gotta write it out. What you say makes complete sense, though. Fucking statistics, HOW DO THEY WORK?! Thanks. I'll go lose some money, now. ETA: Yay, winrar.

Well the answer is the same answer as pretty much every single question about why people lost. It's just variance. People are foolish to think that variance occurs over a set period of days, it can occur for any period in the 'short term' which is any point in time that is non-infinite.

So far the responses in this thread have been pretty much spot on - no matter what psychology you're using to explain it, it should be irrelevant as your profit will trend towards your house edge eventually. Not to mention the idea of having 'pre-funded' accounts might not take into account people like myself who if actually given +EV would be more than happy to pound the casino in the long term for profits. If I've actually got an edge no reason you couldn't just abuse it via botting all day long and eventually approaching your 1%. Unlocking +EV after losing a certain amount is interesting, but once again unless you cap the +EV such that it ends after a certain period it's completely open to abuse.

yes, by being a game creator at CrowdDice.com you get a slight edge (EV+) over the game players.

You have to deposit to JD before you can play.  All bets are off-blockchain.  You play with your balance, and withdraw when you're done.  In a sense you don't play with Bitcoins, you play with JD-IOUs.  When you're done, you click 'withdraw' and hope that we send you real Bitcoins in exchange for your IOUs, in much the same way you hope the casino is going to give you dollars for the clay chips you won.  They might not, but they always have so far.


As far as the house is concerned, isn't everyone the same player?  All the site sees is an endless stream of bets which either win or lose.  In a sense that's indistinguishable from a single player with an unlimited bankroll.  If we can handle an endless stream of finite bankrolls, can't we also handle a single player with infinite funds?

For a week or so before JD launched, we ran the site in "testnet" mode.  People could deposit testnet coins and play with them.  I also made up "fractional reserve" testnet coins out of thin air and gave them away generously.  The site was full of whales with huge bankrolls.  They didn't manage to get anywhere close to bankrupting the site.  Not that that proves anything.  Nakowa came closer with a few real coins than the testers did with their millions of fake testnet coins.


This is a chart showing the actual and (offset) expected profit since nakowa finished his insane run.  Notice how close the two lines run to each other:



There's an offset of some 36k BTC which nakowa "should" have lost but didn't.  We don't expect to ever make that back again.  The expectation is that we stay 36k below 1%, but that it becomes less and less significant over time.

By my estimation in about 100 years if we keep the same volume as this year and have average luck, the site profit will be around 0.99%.  

Edit: and what you should reply is: look at how the black line goes up twice as steeply as the green line since the start of March.  that shows the site has been keeping 2% of turnover when it should only keep 1%.  That's because players play until they bust.  I don't have an answer for that, except that the site has been consistently almost twice as lucky as expected since March.  Weird.

I'm not sure Ivey admits to using edge sorting.  The story I heard suggests that the dealer was colluding with him, placing the high cards upside down in the deck for him.  That would probably be considered closer to "cheating" than "advantage play" wouldn't it?

Poker is the most obvious +EV game in land casinos.  You're playing against other customers with the casino taking a rake, so as long as you're a good enough players that you can beat your peers and beat the rake, you make a profit.

Blackjack is another obvious example if you can find a game where you can count cards.  I used to count cards at Bitcoin casino strikesapphire.com until they changed the penetration and banned me.  Made a few hundred dollars, withdrew into five dollar Bitcoins and hedl.

And a third example is sign-up bonuses.  If a casino offers you 2x your deposit as a sign-up bonus, it's often +EV if you play the right games.  They often make you play through the bonus 20 times or something, in the hope that that's enough to make you lose it, but unless the edge is 5%, your expectation is positive even after playing through it 20 times.  You need to do the math carefully, but it's possible to find +EV promotions.

Some places offer "no zero" roulette, where all bets pay out their actual fair odds.  You get 36x for a single number for example.  That's a zero house edge.  I've seen it suggested that it's +EV for the house because people play until they bust, but I don't believe it.  I think it's offered as a loss-leader to get new customers, and then withdrawn in the hope that they'll play "proper" 2.7% edge roulette.

Where you have to deposit something on the site to bet with. US land casino, you take $1,000 in and get chips. You can't use dollars, must use chips.

I updated my second post here. My stupid's getting in the way, here. I'll write up a script to help me out if there isn't one pre-made. I was thinking about what you ended up posting (thanks)... I'm just unsure if there's really no advantage to having an "unlimited" bankroll. The casino would definitely be screwed out of a lot if someone ended up themselves getting an "unlimited" bankroll from winnings, where they're relatively safe from going bust.

(eta: "figure" was just a reference to the % you posted on what JD "should" earn vs what it does)